All Forum Posts by: Chris John

@Randall

Thank you for the response and for the information.  I'm going to be doing A LOT of research on wholesalers in the next few days.  Would it be ok if I contacted you with any questions I run across?  Thanks again!

I know this is probably an unpopular opinion and I definitely don't know your exact situation, but if I could afford to, I'd probably keep it and buy more property to mitigate my losses and just wait (I love Jonathan's quote above about blood in the street).  Your $500 a month loss is a lot less when you factor the loss on your taxes, depreciation, tax write off for interest, loan retirement, etc.  I'd keep my credit intact to fight another day (knowing full well that this albatross was making it possible).

Obviously, if you actually can't afford it, the problem resolves itself as you have no options...

@Randall
That deal is ridiculous!  Congratulations on that one!  haha.  I've never dealt with wholesalers.  Is it common to come across deals even close to that?  It literally doesn't make sense for them to sell for so cheap... I'm going to have to make some contacts with wholesalers.

@Brad
Honestly, I'm anything but an expert, but here's how I come across my numbers.  Originally, I relied on websites like zillow, craigslist, and rentometer to get a general idea of what rents I could expect.  I'd also use online calculators, etc. to determine expected payments.  I would get my best "guess" as to what I could expect to pay for the mortgage and receive in rent.  From there, I went ahead and contacted real estate agents and mortgage brokers to bounce numbers off of them and get a feel for how accurate my estimations were.  Any agent or broker is going to have a network of people they work with in terms of property managers, fix it guys, contractors, etc. that they can connect you with (obviously, be discriminating when interviewing these people).  I guess what I'm saying is that when you have enough people telling you the same thing, you begin to get confidence.  If zillow, my real estate agent, and a property manager all estimate that a house would rent for around $900/mo. I felt much more confident than just basing it on my original guess.

All of the numbers you get off the internet are great for narrowing down properties that you're interested in, but at that point it's all about personal contacts, networking, and building a team.  If you're not walking the property with experts (or having experts that you trust walking the property for you), I don't think you can ever be too sure of your numbers.  Of course, that's just my opinion (and like I said, I'm anything but an expert).